Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Purpose
The purpose of the group projects is to allow you to explore on your own a large topic in the politics of Congress. I will give you some guidance about the specific topics I'd like you to address, but it will be up to you, as groups and individually, to refine the topics and the questions you address.
Deliverables
The groups will be responsible for delivering two final products. The first will be an oral presentation from each group, lasting 30 minutes each, of the group's findings. The second will be a comprehensive and coherent report, consisting of "chapters" that address particular topics, introduced by a brief introduction that is the responsibility of the whole group. Your final grade will be based on the entire package, blending together your own individual effort and that of the group. To be specific, three-quarters of the grade will be based on your written chapter (a paper of 810 pages) and your oral presentation; one-quarter will be based on the summary essay and the overall quality of the presentation. Finally, I will poll members of both groups, asking you to indicate how the group effort was shared.
running Democratic hegemony in the House. The time is now ripe to consider issues of "conditional party government" in a Republican era.
Assignment
Your assignment is to write a study of party government in Congress during the 1990s, focusing particularly (but not exclusively) on internal congressional politics since the election of 1994. This study should address the following questions: 1. To what can be attributed the dramatic Republican victory of 1994? Was it a onetime phenomenon or did it represent a lasting shift in electoral patterns? 2. How have the party organizations in Congress acted to further the aims of the party in the electoral arena, and how have they balanced the needs of individual members against the greater needs of the party? 3. What mechanisms have the parties used to impose party regularity internally, and how successful have they been? 4. Following the 1994 election the House Republicans instituted a number of committee reforms. How have the committees evolved under those reforms? What difference have they made? 5. How have the partisan strategies varied between the parties in the two chambers? There may be other, similar, questions your group would want to take on. Feel free to generate a better set of questions concerning the partisanship of Congress during the 1990s and answer them.
Assignment
Your assignment is to write a study of the congressional election of 2000. This study should address the following questions: 1. What were the results of the 2000 election and how can they be analyzed in light of past research on individual voting behavior and macro electoral forecasting models? 2. To what degree were there presidential "coattails" in 2000, and how will the presence or absence of those coattails affect policymaking in the near term? 3. How will the reapportionment following the 2000 census affect the distribution of seats around the country and the partisan balance of Congress after the 2002 election? 4. What were the major campaign finance trends of 2000, and how did they differ from the immediate past? 5. What difference will the election outcomes in 2000 make for the composition of the party and committee leaderships in both chambers in the 107th Congress? There may be other, similar, questions your group would want to take on. Feel free to generate a better set of questions concerning the implications of the 2000 congressional election on the politics of the institution.